Vietnam Enlists Allies to Stave Off China’s Reach

Fishermen unloaded a boat in Da Nang, Vietnam. China has been detaining Vietnamese fishermen in a dispute over islands in the South China Sea.Credit
Hoang Dinh Nam/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

HANOI, Vietnam — The archipelago called the Paracel Islands lies in the South China Sea 250 miles off the east coast of Vietnam, a series of rocks and reefs and spits of land that, to the undiscerning eye, appear as valuable as broken coral washed up on a beach.

But that archipelago and the nearby Spratly Islands are rich in oil and natural gas deposits, and so they are coveted by the nations that form a wide arc around the South China Sea. China, Taiwan and Vietnam have competing claims in the Paracels, while all three and the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei have claims on the Spratlys or the waters surrounding them.

The most vociferous are Vietnam and its traditional rival, China. Indeed, no issue between them is more emotional or more intractable.

Tensions crept up another notch last month, after China announced plans to develop tourism in the Paracels, which the Chinese military has controlled since 1974. It was an inauspicious start to what the two governments had officially labeled their “Year of Friendship.”

The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry loudly denounced China’s move, as it usually does in these situations. But quietly, Vietnam has been doing more than just complaining; it has laid the groundwork for another strategy to pry the islands from China’s grasp.

Vietnam is pushing hard behind the scenes to bring more foreign players into negotiations so that China will have to bargain in a multilateral setting with all Southeast Asian nations that have territorial claims in the South China Sea. This goes against China’s preference, which is to negotiate one on one with each country.

In other words, Vietnam wants all parties at the same table to stave off China, the behemoth. This strategy of “internationalizing” the issue is one that smaller Asian countries like Vietnam may adopt more often as they wrangle with the Chinese juggernaut on many fronts. The thinking is: As China’s political power in the world expands, smaller nations will gain leverage over China only if they force it to negotiate in multilateral forums.

Vietnamese officials “are internationalizing the issue, and they’re doing it in a quiet way, not in a direct way,” said Carlyle A. Thayer, a scholar of Southeast Asia and maritime security at the Australian Defense Force Academy. “They say they want to solve it peacefully, but let the international community raise the issue.”

Analysts say a big test for this strategy will come this year, as Vietnam takes over the leadership of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean. Vietnam is likely to use its position to try to persuade the countries to join territorial negotiations with China, analysts say. In November, Vietnam held a conference in Hanoi, its capital, where 150 scholars and officials from across Asia came to discuss disputes in the South China Sea — an opening salvo in the new strategy, analysts say.

“The kind of thing that I took away was that developments in the South China Sea had either deteriorated or had the potential to deteriorate,” said Mr. Thayer, who attended the workshop.

American military and intelligence officials say the South China Sea, which has some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, is growing as a security concern because Beijing is increasingly emboldened to flex its naval muscles there. In the past two years, China has been more aggressive in asserting control over the area — detaining Vietnamese fishermen, increasing sea patrols and warning foreign oil companies away from working with Vietnam.

The United States takes no sides in these disputes, but American officials “remain concerned about tension between China and Vietnam, as both countries seek to tap potential oil and gas deposits that lie beneath the South China Sea,” Scot Marciel, a deputy assistant secretary of state, said in July while testifying before Congress. Mr. Marciel added that China had shown a “growing assertiveness” in regard to what it deemed its maritime rights.

Tensions over such rights plague China’s relations with many of its neighbors. Just last month, Japan protested Chinese plans to develop gas fields in the East China Sea.

For the Vietnamese, the South China Sea dispute is so emotional that it unites virtually all of them under an anti-China nationalist banner, even those in exile who usually abhor Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party. In Houston, a South Vietnamese enclave usually hostile to the Vietnamese government, a pop band proudly calls itself Hoang Sa, the Vietnamese name for the Paracels.

In December, Vietnam asked China to return fishing boats and other equipment seized from fishermen detained by the Chinese military near the islands. One Vietnamese news organization has estimated that China detained 17 vessels and 210 fishermen last year; the fishermen have all been released.

Also in December, the Vietnamese prime minister signed an arms deal in Russia that reportedly included the purchase of six diesel-electric submarines for $2 billion, presumably to be used in the South China Sea.

Meanwhile, China has agreed to continue talks with Vietnam, but it is willing to discuss only joint development of the area, not sovereignty rights. And it refuses to negotiate with all the relevant Southeast Asian nations in any multilateral way.

“There would be too many countries involved,” said Xu Liping, a scholar of Southeast Asia at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

Do Tien Sam, a scholar of China at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, said the Vietnamese government believed the exact opposite, that the “negotiations should involve discussions between at least five countries.”

“They all need to sit down,” Mr. Do said.

The conference here in November was not an official site for talks but rather a workshop intended partly to explore multilateral approaches to the issue. Despite China’s resistance to such approaches, several scholars from research groups in Beijing attended.

Some analysts are skeptical of whether Vietnam will get any traction with its new strategy, especially if it decides to press the issue as it presides over Asean. The association has members that have no stake in the fight, like Cambodia and Myanmar.

“Vietnam’s approach faces real obstacles,” said M. Taylor Fravel, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has written a book on China’s territorial issues. “It is hard to see how consensus can be built within Asean short of a major armed clash involving Chinese forces.”

Xiyun Yang contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2010, on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Vietnam Enlists Allies To Stave Off China’s Reach. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe